Cries and Whispers Essay; Found Doing a Hard Drive Sweep

I’ve been try­ing to orga­nize all of my doc­u­ments, and I found this lit­tle tid­bit that I wrote in col­lege. Who knows what I got on the paper (prob­a­bly a B), but why not just share it with you on the blog. Enjoy.

Ingmar Bergman uses color to trans­late the emo­tions, thoughts, and per­sonal strug­gles of the char­ac­ters in his film, “Cries and Whispers”. The Swedish direc­tor is an archi­tect of the frame, metic­u­lously set­ting up each frame so the audi­ence can receive as much, if not more, infor­ma­tion visu­ally as comes out from the actors’ per­for­mances. Through exam­in­ing his use of color within each of those frames, one can deci­pher the cen­tral ideas of the film.

The most promi­nent color in the film is red. Bergman imme­di­ately sets his audi­ence up to rec­og­nize that this color is impor­tant by run­ning the open­ing cred­its over red. The house’s red walls are promi­nently exposed through­out the film, but rarely, if ever, around Agnes, except when she was a girl, spy­ing on her mother in the red draw­ing room. Another promi­nent use of red in the film is the use of fad­ing to red between seg­ments of the film. In tra­di­tional film lan­guage, a fade to black com­monly occurs between scenes. By fad­ing to red, the direc­tor has drawn atten­tion to the color itself, mak­ing the audi­ence pay more atten­tion to red when­ever it appears on screen. Just like the fades, red per­me­ates the world of the film. Red rep­re­sents love and death, con­cur­rently. It is a very sen­sual color, remind­ing us of lips, the heart, and sex. But it is also a very destruc­tive color, remind­ing us of blood. This dichotomy is what dri­ves the film for­ward. It is a house of death because Agnes’s con­di­tion is what has brought the fam­ily together. However, sex­u­al­ity has per­me­ated this world of death, just as the color red has per­me­ated this world of the film. Thus, sex­u­al­ity and destruc­tion, both man­i­fested by the color red, are insep­a­ra­ble neces­si­ties of the film.

The three sis­ters in the film are shrouded in dif­fer­ent col­ors to rep­re­sent their dif­fer­ent traits: Maria is red; Karin is black; and Agnes is white. This is based on three pro­duc­tion devices: cos­tume, set design, and hair color. Maria can be seen wear­ing red in a num­ber of scenes in the film, and she is also often in a red room. As well, she has red hair. Maria is the most sex­ual of the sis­ters. Red expresses her as a fiery sex­ual being. Red can rep­re­sent death, as afore­men­tioned. Maria does not rep­re­sent death, but rather an insis­tence on choos­ing love over death, hap­pi­ness over sad­ness. Notice how she pulls away when­ever any­thing death related enters her world: her hus­band, Agnes. Karin is often in a black dress and in a dark room, and she has black hair. Here, black rep­re­sents death, or the final stages of life. There is noth­ing youth­ful about Karin. She is the end of sex­u­al­ity and play­ful­ness. In fact, the only way she can arouse her­self is do some­thing destruc­tive like cut­ting her gen­i­tals. Agnes, stricken to bed, is always wear­ing white. Though she does not have white hair, her hair color is extremely impor­tant, as it is a shade of brown that appears to be some­where between red and black hair. Falling in between these two sis­ters is Agnes, who is nei­ther love nor death, but inno­cence. She is always in a vir­ginal white, and does not engage in any illicit activ­i­ties in life. Her only attempt, and not exactly illicit, is when she tries to kiss Maria. This is the only time we see her break out of her vir­ginal inno­cence and attempt to make human contact.

The core idea of Bergman’s film is expressed directly through his use of color: inno­cence, or rather, how we think we should act, is a bal­ance between sex­u­al­ity and destruc­tion. All humans pos­sess the traits that all three sis­ters have, but we must use them in mod­er­a­tion. We can see that Maria’s pow­er­ful sex-drive is sim­ply get­ting her into trou­ble as she has never matured into a woman capa­ble of cop­ing with real human con­flict. Karin has reduced her­self to vio­lence in order to plea­sure her­self as her will to live seems to have van­ished. Agnes is the sis­ter that we must assume we should strive to be like. She is inno­cent and pure and lacks the vices that her sis­ters have sub­mit­ted to. Yet, she is dead, for the inno­cent can­not sur­vive in this world. Bergman is try­ing to point out a very inter­est­ing out­look on human­ity. Human exis­tence is a bal­ance between sex­u­al­ity and destruc­tion, for we are all capa­ble of both. None of us, how­ever, are free of either, for if we were pure, we would not sur­vive, just like Agnes does not.